Some more Michael Jackson

Jackson, #444, 2016

A year ago we introduced you to a fellow to watch named Michael Jackson.  We told you he was out in the UK's west country doing interesting things, photographing ripples in the sand, building paper constructions of mysterious hulking islands, and best of all, playing with light and shadow in the quiet of his darkroom.  He is a prolific artist, we even had trouble trying to calculate how many pieces he'd created - something like one per day was our best, not terribly well-informed, guess, a testimony to both the confidence he has gotten in his system of production and to his obstinate, unflagging energy and creativeness.  At anything near that rate a new Jackson show was a surefire necessity.  Earlier this summer London's MMX Gallery rose to the challenge and exhibited a batch of recent work.  It was a good moment to catch up with him to see how he's doing.

We're talking of course about that part of his output which he terms luminograms, as if to emphasize the primordial role of light in their making (another might call them photograms or skiagrams for similar reasons but let's not get into that discussion) and to distinguish them from the rest of his photographic corpus, which uses light as well, just not primordially.  A slip of theory underlies it: the idea that light, by bending and twisting and refracting, can so to speak show itself, that it can reveal to us something hidden about itself, its inner nature.  So there is a definite quest for knowledge, a search that will have no end because on this earth it seems we can never learn enough; and its waypoints must be intuited, as the knowledge to be found is more likely spiritual than scientific.   

This is very like Mike, his inquisitive frame of mind turning to awe in the face of natural phenomena: he is at home with the big questions and the small to the point of reverence - or innocence.  So that the record of his search becomes the work of art itself, the very pieces we have before us, at once both as documentation and object.  In this examination of his materials - light - Mike can be said to strike at the extreme end of modernism, along with painters like Jasper Johns, Robert Ryman, or Barnet Newman, each with their own quite disparate material obsessions in their day, or of photographers such as the under-recognized Jack Sal.  We can perhaps be grateful, however, in 2016, that his work is less austere than those, and far more sensuous, because the times have changed.  Here are some pieces from the MMX show.  There were 21 in all, each unique, 12 x 16 in. unframed, each of an uncanny beauty.

Jackson, #396, 2016

Jackson, #447, 2016

Jackson, #485 (Valley Landscape), 2016

Jackson, #524, 2016

In the year 1225, Robert Grosseteste wrote a treatise at Oxford in which he said that light extends matter by spreading itself infinitely in every direction and so forms material bodies.  It projects, it induces, it calls into being, it envelopes and continues on.  Mike understands this.  'In a certain sense,' Grosseteste wrote, 'each thing contains all other things.'  Mike gets that too.  He would have been a star pupil.

Jackson toying with light and shadow

Jackson in his studio

installation view at MMX Gallery

The discoveries he makes are not those of the great modern Swiss artists of the photogram, Humbert, Mächler and others, whose results were astounding and simple, astounding in fact because they were so simple.  Rather, he moves from the real world (but what is real about shadows?) to the fantastic and then back again, confusing the two, confounding us in the process and dragging a great deal of references with him, and much of his charm is that his path never fails to astonish.  Jackson is a magician.  Light beckons and he follows wherever it may lead.  'There are senses of reality [in my work],' says Jackson, 'but the rest is so fantastical that it could never be.'

For more information on his motives and methods, check out this video on YouTube produced by the gallery.  I'd like to say 'illuminating' but we're pun-free at the blog.

His website is www.mgjackson.co.uk

The end of the photogram: Roger Humbert

Humbert, IMG_2699. 01.10.2013, 2013

When you first see a picture by Roger Humbert, you know you're in the presence of an artist unlike any other who has dealt with light.  It is a medium he has made his own (as if he had the authority to do so), along with its consorting twin, shadow.  Each defines the other, whiteness and darkness, energy and its absence.  His mind runs over the wavelengths of its spectrum as a pianist's fingers run over the keys.  It's both immanent and elusive, and he thinks about it all the time.

Humbert, IMG_2764. 01.10.2013, 2013

Much has been written of his connection in the early 1960s with the movement known as Concrete Photography, which promoted the idea that a certain minimalism had a philosophic content, or perhaps the other way around, that phenomenological currents in intellectual circles led to a reductive photography.  Influenced in any event by the writings of Max Bense and the graphic work of Swiss compatriot Max Bill (all these Maxes in the service of minimalism!) it found its roots ultimately, going back further, in the Bauhaus teachings of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and before him to Coburn.  We touched on that in an earlier post last year.

That agenda - and the work of the four or five artists gathered at the time for ground-breaking shows in Basel, Bern and Zurich - seems at this juncture, in my opinion, to have been little more than a pretext for critical ponderousness or puffery for a sales pitch to an uncomprehending public.  Addressing those critics, it's not helpful or insightful to claim that photography was becoming self-referential, gazing at the processes that undergird it.  That comes off as obvious, but only because those making the work had driven themselves to do it: it was not necessarily in the plan.

Humbert, IMG_1429. 15.12.2011, 2011

Humbert, IMG_1960. 20.04.2012, 2012

Humbert, IMG_1160. 03.11.2013, 2013

And still, the record shows Humbert preceding the movement by a decade and surviving it happily for many more, no thanks to the commentariat.  He is the real deal, and he is still producing the work.  His is not a postured minimalism but rather one informed by a passion to understand - and, if not understanding fully, for who can, then to depict at least what light really is for us or may be, this thing that is not object but event, surface, density, and more.

Mächler, Sechs quer strahlend, 1971

Even his great countryman and contemporary, the late René Mächler, was not able, in the end, after many years, to approach the mysteries of light with the sensitivity of Humbert.

It all began in the darkroom in the late 1940s, with an enlarger and a tray of photographic chemicals.  Using stencils he would cut out and computer punch cards, a relic most readers of today have never seen, he created photograms.  Then he would move light around to make luminograms.  He used all the methods others have used to explore light (Matter, Jacobi, Arthur Siegel) but without the theatrics or the sentimentality.  Some would say he has paid the price but he would just give us that wan enigmatic smile of his and say he has only gained by it.

Humbert, untitled, 1955

Today he has transitioned to digital in keeping with the times, but here are some earlier works, all analog, now housed in the Fotostiftung Schweiz.  Notice how much the energy in these earlier pictures was made explicit through rapid gestural shifts and the layering of photographic material, whereas now, to imply this energy, all he has to do is massage the depth of field and the bokeh, and use the reductive tension set up by nuanced pools of darkness.  Humbert is a master of this and his recognition is growing.  Photo Edition Berlin recently hosted a solo show of his latest work and published a catalog from which some of these images are taken: you should go out and get it.

Humbert, untitled, 1968

On YouTube, in a conversation with Gunther Dietrich, he recently said he's approaching the end of photograms and of his life-long study of light, that there's nothing more to be done.  From this it's evident that each picture for him is more than just a picture, or less than one: it's an exploration, a journey.  His work is as much science as art.  There is no need to revisit where he has gone before, he has already shown us what is there.

Roger Humbert, 2015

Luminograms from Wales

Jackson, Luminogram study #98, 2015

Jackson, Luminogram study #216, 2015

Jackson, Luminogram study #115, 2015

Michael Jackson is a photographer from Pembrokeshire, Wales (UK).  He lives in a darkish valley just a short distance from the ocean, a proximity that has had a major influence on his work.  He hikes along the cliffs, stares out at the rocky stacks off the coast, or he descends to the tidal coves and spends hours and days alone with his camera, studying eddies in the sand, patterns of flux and reflux.  He listens, watches, and feels.  He meditates.

the artist on the sea-cliffs

Back in the studio, he seeks ways of transmuting this heightened experience into images on paper that will remain a source of continual challenge and excitement for him - to the point where, in fact, it is these that become the main event.  He calls it 'creative play'.  Years of working in the darkroom have honed his method to a fine pitch and reduced it to its essence, which is the study of light itself: what light can do to fool or enchant our perceptions when it's bounced off the silver compounds in the paper, what magic-lantern effects it leaves us bedazzled with.  If this sounds just a little familiar it should be, for these things, these prints, have been known as luminograms since Moholy-Nagy in the 1920s.  Mike had no idea until Gottfried Jäger pointed it out to him - he thought he'd invented it by himself, the same story many an alt-photographer tells about his or her corner of the craft.  

He uses no camera  - doesn't need it - and no film.  As to the light, it may shine squarely down, from an enlarger, or shine rakishly, beaming in from the side; he may have erected scrims or gobos in the light's path or maybe not, depending on inspiration; we do know, or strongly suspect (he's justified in his reticence), that he moves structures around during the exposure, uses torn or folded papers, small constructed models, objects at hand in the darkroom, and maybe even waves his hands back and forth in there too, in a sort of shadow performance.  He calls his work 'gestural' if anything, and that's a clue, but even then he's not finished.  Think of everything you can do in a darkroom and Mike has done it: double exposures, paper negatives, solarization, more.  His technique is evolving with a rapidity only matched by his production - more than one completed print per day over the last six months.  Someday, when he's not so busy, Mike will tell us all.

Jackson, Luminogram study #167, 2015

Jackson, Luminogram study #243, 2015

Readers will want to know some darkroom details and here's what I can share with you.  When he began he used expired RC paper because it was given to him and it'd be crazy not to use it, but he's moved on to fresh material, typically Ilford Multigrade Glossy.  Both work about the same.  Fiber based paper on the other hand doesn't work well at all in Mike's version of the process, he's not sure why.  His experience with some of the great vintage papers referenced here on the blog is slim; he's fine for now with what he's doing.  He uses standard Ilford developer and fixer, nothing tricky there, but he has done a lot of trials varying both their temperature and their mode of application: dripping, spraying, etc.  His solarization methods are what most command my attention - they appear extremely refined and successful, with an almost mezzotint-like delicacy of soft-focus edges and limpid greys; he admits this had been a major area of trial-and-error for him.  He should be very happy with the results.

Jackson, Luminogram study #102, 2015

Somewhat the exception to much current practice, he treats each print as unique and has no interest in editioning them.  'I want to do a print, learn from it and then for it to be in the past - rather than reprinting it over and over... I like the idea of it being similar to how painters work and move forward.'  The advance of time is relentless, just as the oceans continue to slowly grind away at the cliffs of Wales.  There's no looking back.

Jackson, Luminogram study #288, 2015

For those needing to know Mike Jackson better - and you should, there's much more than I've told you here - go to his site at www.mgjackson.co.uk and explore with open eyes.  I don't think I'm alone in finding his work profoundly amazing.